His Great Adventure by Robert Herrick

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Title: His Great Adventure

Author: Robert Herrick

Release Date: May 8, 2019 [eBook #59463]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HIS GREAT ADVENTURE***

This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS

ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

“She drew up a few rods from the center of activity”

HIS GREAT ADVENTURE

BY

ROBERT HERRICK

AUTHOR OF “TOGETHER,” “ONE WOMAN’S LIFE”

“THE COMMON LOT,” ETC.

WITH FRONTISPIECE

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1913

All rights reserved

p. ii

p. v

Copyright, 1912,

By THE FRANK A. MUNSEY COMPANY.

Copyright, 1913,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1913.

FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY

NEW YORK. N. Y., U.S.A.

PART I: FORTUNE

I

It was dusk of an April day, and Fifth Avenue was crowded. A young man, who had emerged from a large hotel,
stood in the stream of traffic and gazed irresolutely up and down the thoroughfare. He wore a long, cheap rain-coat,
and his head was covered by a steamer-cap of an old design, with two flaps tied in a knot across the top, behind which
an overabundant crop of dull black hair pushed forth.

His thin, sallow face was unshaven, and his eyes were rimmed by round steel spectacles that gave him an almost owlish
expression. An air of dejection hung about him, as he loitered by the curb—not the imaginative depression of youth,
soon to float off like a cloud before the sun of life, but rather the settled gloom of repeated failure, as if the conviction of
final doom had already begun to penetrate deeply into his manhood.

He looked first up the avenue, then down, vacant of purpose, seeing nothing in the moving pageant. Finally, as if
aroused by certain curious glances that the less hurried passers-by cast on him, he bestirred himself and moved on
down the avenue, his shoulders stooped, his legs trailing wearily.

Thus he proceeded for several blocks, never raising his head, stopping mechanically at the street crossings, resuming his
discouraged pace as the crowd moved on. Once he plunged his hand into his coat pocket, to assure himself of some
possession, and then withdrew it with a bitter smile for his unconscious anxiety.

When in this vacant promenade he had reached the lower part of the avenue, where the crowd was less dense, and less
gay and rich in appearance, he lifted his head and looked musingly into the misty space before him.

“Well,” he muttered, with tightening lips, “it’s only one more throw-down. I ought to be used to ’em by now!”

Nevertheless, his face relapsed into its melancholy expression as he turned into one of the side streets with the
unconscious precision of the animal following a beaten path to its hole.

He crossed several of the shabbier commercial avenues, which were crowded with traffic and blocked by men and
women returning from the day’s work. Compared with these tired laborers, he seemed to have a large leisure—the
freedom of absolute poverty. His thoughts had turned to supper. Should he buy a roll and a piece of pie at the bakery
on the next corner, or—mad venture!—dissipate his last resources at the saloon opposite, where the Italian wife of the
Irish proprietor offered appetizing nourishment for a quarter?

Meditating upon this important decision, the young man entered his own block. At one end the elevated trains rattled;
at the other, heavy drays lumbered past in an unbroken file on their way to the ferries; but between the two there was a
strip of quiet, where the dingy old houses were withdrawn from the street, and in front of them a few dusty shrubs
struggled for life in the bare plots of earth.

In the middle of this block there was an unusually animated scene. A group of children had huddled together about
some object of interest. A horse must have fallen on the pavement, the young man thought dully, or there was a fight, or
a policeman had made a capture.

He hurried his lagging steps, moved by a boyish curiosity. As he drew nearer, he perceived that the circle was too
small to contain a horse or a good scrap. The center of interest must be some unfortunate human being. He shouldered
his way through the crowd.

“What’s up?” he asked of a small boy.

“A drunk,” was the laconic reply.

Looking over the heads of the boys, the young man could see the figure of a stoutish, well-dressed man lying prone on
the pavement. His black coat was spattered with mud, his gray hair rumpled. His eyes were closed, and through the

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open lips his tongue protruded.

“Say, he’s bad!” the boy observed knowingly. “Just look at him!”

A convulsion shook the prostrate figure. The face began to twitch, and one arm waved violently, beating the air. One
or two more mature passers-by who had been attracted by the disturbance drew off, with the selfish city excuse that the
proper authorities would come in time and attend to the nuisance. Not so the idle young man.

“He isn’t drunk!” he exclaimed, pushing his way into the circle and stooping over the figure. He had seen too many
plain “drunks” in his newspaper days to be deceived in the symptoms.

“There he goes again!” the boys shouted.

“He has some sort of fit. Here, one of you give me a hand, and we’ll get him off the street!”

The boys readily helped the young man to drag the prostrate figure to the nearest steps, and one of them ran to the
corner after a policeman. When the officer arrived, the young man, who had steadied the stranger through another
convulsion, said:

“You’ll have to call an ambulance. We’d better carry him somewhere—can’t let him lie here in the street like a dog.
We can take him to my room.”

He motioned toward the next house, and with the officer’s assistance carried the sick man into the rear room on the first
floor, which he unlocked. Then the policeman drove the curious boys out of the house and went off to summon the
ambulance. Left alone, the young man dipped a towel in his water-pitcher, wet the sick man’s brow, then wiped his
face and cleaned the foam and dirt from his beard and lips.

The stranger, lying with half-closed eyes, looked to be rather more than sixty years of age. Judging from the quality of
his clothes, and from his smooth hands, he was a well-to-do business man. Presently his eyelids began to twitch, then
the whole face; the right leg shot out and beat the air; then the right arm began to wave, and foam oozed from his lips.

“I wish they’d hurry that ambulance!” the young man thought, as he wiped the sick man’s face again with the damp
towel. “He won’t last long, at this rate!”

This convulsion gradually passed off as the others had, and the stranger lay once more as if dead, his eyes almost wholly
closed. The young man went to the door and listened nervously, then returned to the prostrate form, unbuttoned the
coat, and felt for the heart. Immediately the sick man opened his eyes, and, looking directly into the eyes of the man
bending over him, tried to raise his hand, as if he would protect himself from a blow.

“It’s all right!” the young man said reassuringly. “I was just feeling for your heart, friend.”

The sick man’s lips twitched desperately; and finally, in the faintest whisper, he managed to stammer:

“Wh-who are you?”

“One Edgar Brainard,” the young man replied promptly. “Let me unfasten this vest and make you more comfortable.”

“N-n-no!” the sick man gasped suspiciously.

He managed to clutch Brainard’s wrist with his wavering right hand; his left lay quite powerless by his side. His eyes
closed again, but the lips moved silently, as if he were trying to frame sounds.

“He’s going this time, sure!”

The young man slipped his wrist from the feeble grasp, inserted a pillow under the sick man’s head, and sat back to
wait.

II

It was very still in that back room. No step sounded in the hall, and the noise from the street came muffled. In the
stillness, the sick man’s desperate efforts to breathe filled the little room with painful sounds. Brainard felt the stifling
approach of death, and opened the window wide to get what air would come in from the small court outside.

He studied the figure on the lounge more closely. The thick, red under lip curled over the roots of the gray beard. A
short, thick nose gave the face a look of strong will, even of obstinacy. There was a foreign expression to the features
that might indicate German descent.

On the third finger of his right hand, the sick man wore an old, plain gold ring, which had sunk deep into the flesh. From
the inside pocket of his short coat bulged a thick wallet, over which his right hand rested, as if to guard precious
possessions.

“He thought I was going to rob him!” Brainard observed. “Expect he’s been up against it already—and that’s what’s
the trouble.”

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It was quite dark. The young man lighted a gas-jet, then went again to the door. As he stood there, listening, he felt the
old man’s eyes on him, and turned to look at him. The eyes, now wide open, held him, asking what the lips refused to
utter.

Brainard went back to his patient and leaned over to catch the flutter from the moving lips. At last, as if with great
exertion, the murmur came:

“Wh-wh-what are you go-going to do—to do—with me?”

In spite of the faintness of the whisper, it was the voice of one accustomed to being answered.

“I’ve sent an officer for an ambulance,” Brainard replied. “It ought to be here before now, I should think. They’ll take
you to some hospital and fix you up,” he added encouragingly.

The lips twitched into a semblance of a smile, then mumbled:

“No—not—th-this time.”

“What’s the matter—accident?” Brainard asked.

The sick man did not attempt to reply, as if he considered the question of trifling importance. Instead, his eyes studied
the young man’s face intently. Evidently his brain was clearing from the shock, whatever had caused it, and he was
revolving some purpose. Soon the lips began to move once more, and Brainard bent close to catch the faint sounds.

“Wh-wh-what’s your bus-bus-i-ness?”

“Oh, I’ve had lots of businesses,” the young man replied carelessly. “Been on a newspaper, in the ad business, real
estate, and so on.” He added after a moment, with a little ironical laugh, “Just now I’m in the literary business—a
dramatist.”

The sick man looked puzzled, and frowned, as if disappointed. Perhaps his cloudy brain could not assort this
information with his purpose. Presently his brow contracted, his face twitched violently, the right leg shot out.

“I say! It’s too bad,” the young man exclaimed sympathetically. “I wish I knew what to do for you. Where can that
ambulance be?” He laid one hand on the sick man’s hot brow, and held his arm with the other. “Easy now!” he
exclaimed, as the right arm began whirling. “There! Steady! It’s going off.”

Instead of closing his eyes, as he had done after the previous attacks, and relapsing into coma, the sick man made an
immediate effort to speak.

“Co-come here,” he articulated faintly. “Important, very important.”

He groped feebly for his inner pocket.

“You want me to take out this bundle?” Brainard asked, laying his hand on the bulky wallet.

The man made an affirmative sign, and kept his eyes steadily on Brainard while the latter gently extracted the
pocketbook.

“You—you will do something for me?” the stranger said more distinctly than he had hitherto spoken, as if urgency were
clearing his mind. “You can—you can start to-night?”

“I’m not very busy,” the young man said, with a laugh. “I guess I could start for Hong-Kong on a few minutes’ notice.”

“Not Hong-Kong,” the old man labored forth literally. “You’re honest?”

It was said in a tone of self-conviction rather than of question.

“Oh, I guess so,” the young man answered lightly. “At least, what’s called honest—never had a chance to steal
anything worth taking!” He added more seriously, to quiet the sick man, who seemed to be laboring under excitement,
“Tell me what you want done, and I’ll do my best to put it through for you.”

The sick man’s eyes expressed relief, and then his brow contracted, as if he were summoning all his powers in a final
effort to make a clogged brain do his urgent will.

“Lis-lis-listen,” he murmured. “No—no, write—write it down,” he went on, as Brainard leaned forward.

Brainard looked about his bare room for paper, but in vain. He felt in his pockets for a stray envelope, then drew from
his overcoat a roll of manuscript. He glanced at it dubiously for a moment, then tore off the last sheet, which had on
one side a few lines of typewriting. With a gesture of indifference, he turned to the sick man and prepared to take his
message.

“All ready,” he remarked. “I can take it in shorthand, if you want.”

“Sev-en, thir-ty-one, and four. Sev-en, thir-tyone, and four. Sev-en, thir-ty-one, and four,” he repeated almost
briskly.

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Brainard looked at him inquiringly, and the stranger whispered the explanation: “Combi-na-tion pri-vate safe—
understand?” Brainard nodded.

“Where?”

“Office—San Francisco.”

The young man whistled.

“That’s a good ways off! What do you want me to do there?”

“Take everything.”

“What shall I do with the stuff? Bring it here to New York?” the young man inquired, with growing curiosity.

The sick man’s blue eyes stared at him steadily, with a look of full intelligence.

“I shall be dead then,” he mumbled.

“Oh, I hope not!” Brainard remarked.

But with unflinching eyes, the sick man continued:

“You must have—pow-er—pow-er of attorney.”

He brought the words out with difficulty, not wasting his strength by discussing his chances of recovery. He was
evidently growing weaker, and Brainard had to bend close to his lips in order to catch the faint whisper, “Take it
down!”

And with his face beginning to twitch, and the convulsive tremors running over his body, the sick man summoned all his
will and managed to dictate a power of attorney in legal terms, as if he were familiar with the formula. When he had
finished, his eyes closed, and his lips remained open. Brainard dropped his paper and felt for the sick man’s heart. It
was still beating faintly.

After a few moments, the eyes opened mistily, and again the man made an effort to collect himself for another effort.

“What shall I do with the stuff?” Brainard inquired.

“Ge-get it out of the country. Take it to—to Ber-Ber-Ber—”

“Bermuda?” Brainard suggested.

“Berlin!” the sick man corrected with a frown. As if to impress his messenger with the seriousness of his work, he
added, “If you don’t get away, they’ll—kill you.”

“Oh!” Brainard exclaimed, impressed.

The blue eyes examined the young man steadily, as if they would test his metal. Then, satisfied, the man murmured:

“Quick—must—sign—quick! Now!” he concluded, as his face began to twitch.

Brainard handed him a pen, and held his right arm to steady him while he scrawled his name—“H. Krutzmacht.” The
sick man traced the letters slowly, patiently, persisting until he had dashed a heavy line across the t’s and another
beneath the name; then he dropped the pen and closed his eyes.

When another moment of control came to him, he whispered uneasily:

“Witness? Must have witness.”

“We’ll find some one—don’t worry,” the young man replied lightly. “The ambulance man, when he comes, if he ever
does come!”

Brainard did not yet take very seriously the idea of starting that night for San Francisco to rifle a safe.

“Mo-mo-money,” the voice began, and the eyes wandered to the fat wallet which Brainard had deposited on the table.

Brainard lifted the wallet.

“Plen-plen-plenty of mon-money!”

“I understand,” the young man replied. “There’s enough cash for the journey in here.”

As he laid the wallet down, there was the welcome sound of feet in the passage outside, and with an exclamation of
relief the young man flung open the door. The ambulance surgeon was there with an assistant and a stretcher. With a
muttered explanation for his delay, the doctor went at once to the sick man and examined him, while Brainard told what
he knew of his strange guest.

“Tries to talk all the time—must be something on his mind!” he said, as another convulsion seized the sick man. “Been

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doped, I should say.”

“Looks like brain trouble, sure,” the ambulance surgeon remarked, watching the stranger closely. “He can’t last long
that way. Well, we’d better hustle him to the hospital as soon as we can.”

They had the sick man on the stretcher before he had opened his eyes from his last attack. As they lifted him, he
mumbled excitedly, and Brainard, listening close to his lips, thought he understood what was troubling him.

“He wants that paper witnessed,” he explained. “I forgot—it’s something he dictated to me.”

“Well, hurry up about it,” the surgeon replied carelessly, willing to humor the sick man. “Here!”

Brainard dipped his pen in the ink-bottle and handed it to the surgeon, who lightly dashed down his signature at the
bottom of the sheet, without reading it.

“Now are we ready?” the doctor demanded impatiently.

But the blue eyes arrested Brainard, and the young man, stooping over the stretcher, caught a faint whisper:

“You’ll g-g-go?”

“Sure!”

“Gi-gi-give it all to—”

Krutzmacht struggled hard to pronounce a name, but he could not utter the word.

“It’s no use!” the doctor exclaimed. “Tell him to wait until he’s better.”

But Brainard, moved by the sick man’s intense look of mental distress, raised his hand to the doctor and listened. At
last the whispered syllable reached his ear:

“M-M-Mel—”

“I tell you it’s no use!” the ambulance doctor repeated irritably. “They’ll find out at the hospital what he wants done.
Come on!”

As they bore the stretcher through the narrow door, the agonized expression gave way, and the sick man articulated
more distinctly:

“Mel-Melo—”

“Melo-melodrama!” Brainard said. “It’s all right, my friend. Don’t worry—I’ll fix it up for you!”

With astonishing distinctness came back the one word:

“Melody!”

“All right—Melody!”

The sick man would have said more, but the ambulance men bore him swiftly to the waiting vehicle and shoved him in.

“Will you come along?” the doctor asked.

“No. I’ll look in some time to-morrow, probably—St. Joseph’s, isn’t it?”

The sick man’s eyes still rested on Brainard, when the latter poked his head into the dark ambulance. They seemed to
glow with a full intelligence, and also with a command, as if they said:

“Do just what I’ve told you to do!”

“He knows what he wants, even if he can’t say it,” Brainard muttered to himself as the ambulance moved off. “Poor
old boy!”

III

When Brainard opened the door of his room, he heard the rustle of papers on the floor, blown about by the draft from
the window. He lighted his lamp and picked up the loose sheets, which were the typewritten leaves of his last play—
the one that he had finally got back that very afternoon from a famous actor-manager, without even the usual note of
polite regret from the secretary. The absence of that familiar note had dejected him especially.

He shoved the rejected play into his table drawer indifferently, thinking of the sick man’s last urgent look, and of the
terrible effort he had made to articulate his final words. What did he mean by “Melody”? Perhaps the old fellow was
really out of his head, and all the rest about his valuable papers in some private safe at the other end of the continent
was mythical—the fancy of an unhinged mind.

But the memory of the old man’s face—of those keen blue eyes—made Brainard reject such a commonplace solution

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of the puzzle. The sick man had been in this room with him for a full half-hour, and the place still seemed filled with his
positive, commanding personality.

No! The man who signed “H. Krutzmacht” to the sheet lying on the table before him was no vague lunatic. Though he
might be at the extremity of life, almost unable to articulate, nevertheless his purpose was clear to himself, and his will
was as strong as ever.

Brainard was hungry. Snatching up his old cap, he went out to the neighboring avenue, and, without hesitation, entered
the most expensive restaurant in sight—a resort he frequented only on rare days of opulence. Instead of the oyster-
stew and doughnuts which had latterly been his luxurious limit, he ordered a good dinner, as if he had earned it, and
devoured the food without the usual qualms of prudence.

His spirits had undergone a marvelous change from the timid, fearful state in which he had been that afternoon. He
wondered at his own confidence. Complacently selecting a good cigar at the cashier’s desk, he strolled back to his
room, his body peacefully engaged in the unaccustomed task of digesting a full meal.

When he entered his dreary little room, his eye fell upon the wallet, which lay under the table where he had dropped it.
What was he going to do with that—with this whole Krutzmacht business? Why, simply nothing at all. In the morning,
he would go around to St. Joseph’s and see how the sick man was. If Krutzmacht recovered, there was nothing to do
but to return his pocketbook. But if he got worse, or was dead already? Well, Brainard could turn the wallet over to
the hospital people or the coroner, and that would end the affair for him.

With this prudent resolution he took his play from the drawer, and looked it over. His interest in the thing had quite
gone, and the sting of its rejection no longer smarted. Very likely it was as bad as the managers to whom he had
submitted it seemed to think. He tied the manuscript together with a piece of twine, and shoved it back into the drawer.

One sheet—that last one on which he had taken down Krutzmacht’s dictation—was missing from this roll. That sheet
contained his final curtain. He looked at the lines, and smiled as he read. The Lady Violet was parting from her lover,
with the following dialogue:

Violet.—Oh, Alexander!

Alexander.—Violet!

Violet.—What will you do, dearest?

Alexander.—I go on my great adventure!

Violet.—Your great adventure?

Alexander.—Life!

He turned the sheet over. On the other side were the few shorthand notes he had hastily jotted down—the figures of
the safe combination and the power of attorney with its legal phrases, the latter written out again below in long hand. At
the bottom of the sheet, just beneath Alexander’s heroic announcement to Violet, were the three signatures. The old
man’s blunt name dominated the others—a firm, black scrawl with a couple of vicious dashes.

The powerful will of the sick man, working in what might be the agony of death, spoke in that signature. Brainard felt
that there was something mysterious in it. The name spoke to him as the eyes had spoken to him, personally.
Criminal? Possibly. Dramatic? Oh, surely! He felt instinctively that there was more drama on this side of the sheet
than on the other.

He folded the paper carefully and put it in his inner pocket. It would be an interesting souvenir.

As the young man sat and smoked in his little room, the comfort of his abundant meal penetrating his person, he felt
more and more the drama of actual life touching him, calling to him to take a hand in it. He reached unconsciously for
the fat wallet, and opened it. There were some legal papers—contracts and leases and agreements, at which Brainard
merely glanced.

He felt into the inner recesses of the old-fashioned wallet, and from one pocket extracted a thick sheaf of bank-notes.
They were in large denominations—hundreds, fifties, and twenties. Brainard smoothed out the bills on his knee and
carefully counted them; in all there was rather more than four thousand dollars.

“The old boy traveled with quite a wad!” he muttered, fingering the crisp bills.

The touch of the money gave a curious electric thrill to his thoughts. Here was an evidence of reality that made the old
man’s mumbled words and intense effort assume a reasonable shape. When Krutzmacht let Brainard take possession
of this wallet, he knew what it contained. He trusted to a stranger in his desperate need.

Still feeling around in the folds of the wallet, Brainard extracted a railroad-ticket of voluminous length for San Francisco.

“He was on his way to the train!” Brainard exclaimed, and added unconsciously, “when they got him and did him up!”

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Already his busy mind had accepted the hypothesis of enemies and foul play rather than that of disease.

With the railroad-ticket and the money in his hand, he stood staring before him, still debating the matter. Something
seemed to rise within him, some determination—a spirit of daring which he had not felt for years.

Mechanically he put the papers and bank-notes back into the wallet, and shoved it into his pocket. Then he looked at
his watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. If he was to leave to-night, as the old man had ordered, there was no more time
to lose.

Without further hesitation, he threw a few articles into an old bag and started for the ferry. On the way he stopped to
telephone the hospital. After a delay which made him impatient, he learned that the sick man was resting quietly—“still
unconscious,” the nurse said. So he had not spoken again.

When Brainard reached the station in Jersey City, having a few moments to spare, he wrote a brief note to the hospital
authorities, saying that he was leaving the city on business, and would call on his return in a week or ten days. He
inclosed several bank-notes, requesting that the sick man should have every comfort. Having dropped his letter into the
box he stepped into the Chicago sleeper. The exhilarating beat of his heart told him that he had done well.

The disdainful look that the porter had given him when he took charge of his shabby bag, as well as the curious glances
of his fellow passengers, the next morning, made Brainard conscious of his eccentric appearance. But all that he could
do, for the present, to improve his neglected person, was to have himself shaved and his hair cut. He was obliged to
keep his rain-coat on, although the car was hot, in order to cover up a large hole in his trousers—the only pair he
possessed.

He resolved to employ the few hours in Chicago, between trains, in making himself as decent as possible. Meanwhile
he ate three good meals and furtively watched his more prosperous fellow travelers.

IV

It was a very different person, in appearance, who seated himself on the observation platform of the Overland Limited
that evening. Only the round steel spectacles were left as a memento of Brainard’s former condition. He had had no
scruples in helping himself freely from the store of bills in the wallet. What lay before him to do for the sick man would
probably be difficult, in any event, and it would be foolish to handicap himself by presenting a suspicious appearance at
Krutzmacht’s office. He would play his part properly dressed.

So, when he glanced into the little mirror beside his berth, he smiled in satisfaction at the clean-shaven, neatly dressed,
alert young man who looked back at him. With his ragged habiliments he seemed also to have discarded that settled
look of failure, and not a few of his years. Without unduly flattering himself, he felt that he might easily be taken for one
of the energetic young brokers or lawyers whom he observed on the train.

Removing his new hat, and stretching his well-shod feet on the cushioned seat opposite, he took up the evening
newspapers and glanced through them for some telegraphic item about the fate of his mysterious employer. If
Krutzmacht were a well-known figure, as he supposed likely, reporters must doubtless have discovered him before this
and proclaimed his predicament to the world. But Brainard could find no reference to any such person in the
newspapers, and with a sigh of relief he let them slip from his lap.

His task would be easier, if it could be accomplished while the sick man lay undiscovered in the hospital. If he should
already be dead, when he arrived, there would be an end to Brainard’s job altogether; and that would have been a
keen disappointment to the young man.

His job? A hundred times his mind reverted to this perplexing consideration—what, exactly, was he to do when he had
reached the end of his long journey?

First, he would find where Krutzmacht’s offices were, and then? He had been told to make off with whatever he might
find in the private safe. For this purpose he had provided himself, in Chicago, with a bulky leather valise, in which his
discarded raiment was now reposing. It all sounded like an expedition in high piracy, but he quieted any scruples with
the resolve that he would make off merely to New York, if Krutzmacht still lived, instead of Berlin, and remain there to
await further developments.

So, as the Overland Limited rushed across the prairie states, Brainard took counsel with himself, mentally sketching out
his every move from the moment when he should step from the train. The readiness with which his mind reached out to
this new situation surprised himself; he was already becoming in some way a new person.

The journey itself was a revelation to him and an education. With his Broadway prejudice that the United States
stopped somewhere just above the Bronx and behind the Jersey hills, he was astonished to find so much habitable
country beyond these horizons and so many people in it who did not seem to depend upon New York City for their
livelihood or happiness. At first he was so much preoccupied with his errand and himself in his surprising new rôle that
he paid little attention to the scenes spread before his eyes. Chicago impressed him only as a dirtier and more
provincial New York. But the next morning when he awoke at Omaha he began to realize that America was more than
a strip of land along the Atlantic seaboard, and by the time the train had left Ogden his respect for his fatherland had

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immensely increased.

He noticed also that the character of the people on the train was gradually changing. Large, rough-looking men, with
tanned faces not too carefully shaved, and sometimes with a queer assortment of jewelry and patent leather shoes took
the places of the pallid, smooth shaven business men that had been his companions from Jersey City to Chicago. There
were also a number of women traveling alone, large, competent, and not overrefined. Brainard, whose ideas of
Americans other than the types to be seen on the streets of New York had been drawn from the travestied figures of
the stage,—the miner and the cowboy with flapping sombrero and chaps,—watched these new specimens of his fellow
countrymen with keen interest. In spite of their rather uncouth speech and their familiarity with the negro porters, they
were attractive. They had a vigorous air about them, indicating that they came from a big country, with big ways of
doing things in it, and a broad outlook over wide horizons. The would-be dramatist began to perceive that the world
was not peopled wholly by the types that the American stage had made familiar to him.

A little way beyond Ogden the train rolled out into the bright blue inland sea of the Great Salt Lake and trundled on for
mile after mile in the midst of the water on a narrow strip of rocky roadbed. Brainard had read in the newspapers of
this famous “Lucin cut-off” where in an effort to save a detour of a few miles around the shore of the lake millions of
tons of “fill” had been dumped into an apparently bottomless hole. The pluck and the energy of that road builder who
had conceived this work and kept at it month after month, dumping trainloads of rock into a great lake had not specially
thrilled him when he read of it. But now the imagination and the courage of the little man who did this sort of thing
thrilled him. Harriman, the bold doer of this and greater things, was of course a popular Wall Street hero to the New
Yorker,—one of those legendary creatures who were supposed to have their seat of power in the lofty cliffs of that
narrow Via Dolorosa and somehow like the alchemists of old conjure great fortunes out of air, with the aid of the
“tape.” That was the way in which this young man had always thought of Harriman,—“the wizard of railroad finance.”

But now as he glided smoothly over the solid roadbed that ran straight westward into the remote distance with the salt
waves almost lapping the tracks and leaving a white crust from their spume, with lofty mountains looming to south and
to north,—as he stood on the rear platform of the heavy steel train observing this marvelous panorama,—a totally new
conception of the renowned financier came to him. This was not done by watching the tape! It demanded will and
force and imagination and faith—spiritual qualities in a man—to do this. The young traveler mentally did homage to the
character that had created the wonderful highway over which for a day and a half he had been comfortably borne in
luxurious ease.

As he watched the blue mountains about Ogden fade into the haze, it seemed that New York, his life there, and all his
conventional conceptions of the little world in which he had vainly struggled for existence also receded and grew
smaller, less real. The train in its westward flight was bearing him forward into a new world, within as well as without!
As the track began to wind up again to higher levels before taking its next great leap over the Sierras, Brainard went
forward to the smoking room, his usual post of observation, where he sat through long, meditative hours, listening to the
talk about him and gazing at the fleeting landscape. Whatever else it might mean,—this jaunt across the continent on a
stranger’s errand,—it was bringing him a rich cargo of new ideas.

Of all his fellow travelers the man who happened to occupy the drawing-room in the car where Brainard had his section
aroused his curiosity especially. He was one of those well-dressed, alert young business men who had made Brainard
conscious of his shabby and inappropriate appearance when he first started on his journey. The door of his room had
been closed all the way to Chicago, and Brainard had seen nothing of the man. But since the train left Omaha the door
to the drawing-room had been open, and from his section Brainard observed its occupant diligently reading a book.
What aroused his attention and interested him in the stranger more than his pleasant appearance of frank good humor
had been the sort of book he had chosen for this long journey. It was bound like a “best seller” in a gaudy red cloth,
and a picture of a starry-eyed maiden with floating hair adorned the cover. But it was labeled in unmistakable black
letters Paradise Lost. Brainard, who had made a painful and superficial acquaintance in his youth with this poetic
masterpiece, decided that the smartly dressed young American could not be devoting the journey to Milton’s epic. It
must be that some writer of best sellers had cribbed the great poet’s title and fitted it to a less strenuous tale of love and
starry-eyed maidens. This theory, however, broke down before the fact that from time to time the young man consulted
a small black book that was indubitably a dictionary, and Brainard taking advantage of a moment when the traveler had
left his room assured himself that the book was really a copy of Milton’s poem set within profane modern covers. Just
why this young man should spend his hours on the train reading the puritan epic of heaven and hell puzzled Brainard and
whetted his curiosity to know what sort of man the stranger was.

Earlier this morning as the train was climbing down from the Rockies into Utah, an opportunity had come to speak to
his fellow traveler. The train had pulled up somewhere before a desolate station whose architect had tried to make a
Queen Anne cottage that looked singularly out of place in the bare, wild landscape. While the engine took its long
drink, the passengers stretched their legs and enjoyed the crisp mountain air. The stranger came to the vestibule,
yawned, and read the name of the station:

“Palisade, is it? . . . The last time I was over this way it looked more lively than this.”

“What was happening?” Brainard inquired.

“There was a bunch of miners somewheres in Utah making trouble, on a strike. The company had brought in a couple
of carloads of greasers, and the miners were down here shooting up the party.”

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He got down to the ground, yawned again, and opened a gold cigarette case which he offered to Brainard,—“Have
one?”

Brainard took one of the monogrammed cigarettes, and they sauntered together in the sunlight.

“Yes, sir,” his new acquaintance continued, “they sure did have a lively time. The greasers were over there on the
siding in their cars, and they just let go at ’em with their guns. Now and then they’d hit the station, for fun, you know. I
guess maybe you can see the holes yet.”

The young man pointed up at some scars among the shingles and a broken window in the upper story. “Sure enough
they left their marks!”

“What did they do to ’em?” Brainard asked naïvely, as they returned to the car when the conductor droned “all
aboard.”

“Who?” the stranger asked. “The police?”

He waved a hand at the desolate stretch of sage brush backed by grim mountains and laughed. As the train moved off,
he added, “Lord, I don’t know! They were still popping when my train pulled out. There weren’t many greasers fit to
work in the mines. What was left after the reception must have walked home—a long ways.”

Brainard was somewhat impressed with the possibilities of a country that could offer such a scrap, en passant, so to
speak. The stranger invited him into his room and gave him another cigarette.

“From New York?” he inquired. “Not a bad sort of place,” he observed tolerantly. “Ever been on the Coast? You’ve
something to see.”

“How is San Francisco since the earthquake?” Brainard inquired, thinking to come cautiously and guardedly to the topic
of Krutzmacht.

“It’s all there and more than ever,” the stranger cheerily responded. “You won’t find any large cracks,” he jested.

“It’s queer that you all went straight back to the same ground and built over again.”

“Why? It was home, wasn’t it? Folks always have a feeling for the place they’ve lived in, even if it has disadvantages.
It’s only human!”

Brainard reflected that this was a sentimental point of view he should hardly have expected from the practical sort of
man opposite him. In the course of their conversation Brainard inquired about the graft prosecution then in full swing,
which had attracted the notice even of eastern papers on account of the highly melodramatic flavor that a picturesque
prosecuting attorney had given to the proceedings. The man from San Francisco readily gave his point of view, which
was unfavorable to the virtuous citizens engaged in the task of civic purification. When Brainard asked about the
celebrated prosecuting attorney, the stranger looked at him for the first time suspiciously, and said coldly:

“Well, as that gentleman has just been parading up and down the state saying he was going to put me in state prison for
the better part of my remaining years, I can’t say I have a high opinion of him.”

“Indeed!” Brainard emitted feebly. The stranger was more mysterious than ever. He did not seem in the least like a
candidate for state prison.

“You see,” the young man continued cheerfully, “I’m loose now on about seventy-five thousand dollars of bonds. Time
was up in fact day before yesterday, and I’ve been wondering some what they are going to do to my bondsmen. Well,
we’ll find out at Ogden when we get the coast papers.”

And when they reached Ogden Brainard ventured to inquire, seeing his new acquaintance deep in the folds of a San
Francisco newspaper,—“Well, what did they do to those bondsmen?”

“Nothing yet, so far as I can see. Oh, hell, it’s all bluff anyway!” and he dropped his newspaper out of the open
window. . . .

A man of such cheerful and frank presence, who read Paradise Lost (with the aid of a dictionary) and traveled to New
York on seventy-five thousand dollars of bail bonds was a curiosity to Brainard. He very much wished to ask him a
few impertinent questions in order to satisfy his curiosity, but could not summon sufficient courage, though he felt sure
that the agreeable stranger would cheerfully enlighten him.

V

As Brainard entered the smoking compartment of the “club car,” he observed that his interesting fellow traveler was in
close conversation with a new arrival, who had taken the section opposite Brainard at Ogden. He had already noted
this grizzled, thickset person, about sixty years old, who wore a black frock coat, had a large seal ring and a massive
Masonic charm. When the newcomer opened his grip to extract a black skull cap, he had seen that the remaining
contents of the bag were a mass of papers, a few bits of loose rock, and a bottle of whisky. Whatever toilet articles the
traveler carried were carefully concealed.

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Already the oldish, grizzled traveler with the skull cap was at home, the center of a little group of men at one of the card
tables,—a bottle of beer in front of him, a cigar tilted at an angle between his teeth. He was conversing with that perfect
naturalness and freedom that Brainard had observed was the custom in this large country, even among complete
strangers.

“Yes, sir,” he was saying, “I came back from Alaska in 1907 broke,—that is, what you might call broke,—a couple of
thousand dollars all I had in the world. I said to my wife, ‘I’m done with mines! For good. I’ve spent the better part
of thirty years chasing gold, and there may be money to be got out of the ground, but it ain’t for me.’ And would you
believe it? The next morning I was starting for Union! Met a man I knew at the hotel in Seattle and he showed me
some samples of the ore they were taking out there. And I started. The old woman too. Been there ever since!” He
paused as if to let the others say “Kismet!” and repeated,—“Been there ever since, working the next claim. My wife
died six months ago, and I got lonely and thought I’d come out and see what had happened to Frisco since the quake.”

From this point the talk drifted on erratically as the train rushed towards the Sierras. The agreeable young man who
read Paradise Lost and was under bonds to justice seemed to have an extensive acquaintance in common with the
grizzled miner. They discussed some Scotchman who had been mining but now owned an oil well in the “Midway field”
that was reputed to be bringing in five thousand dollars a day. Another of their friends—an Englishman—had a silver
“proposition” in Mexico. There was also Jimmie Birt who owned a string of horses and had sunk a fortune in a mine in
British Columbia, but Jimmie, it seemed, was making good in Oregon timber land. So it went with one adventurer after
another, roaming this side of the continent, now penniless, to-morrow with millions, restlessly darting from subarctic
Alaska to subtropical Mexico along the coast or the mountain spine of the continent. They sought gold and silver and
copper, oil and wood and cattle, water-power, wheat, and wine,—it made little odds what. Everything was a “big
proposition” in which to make or lose. Brainard drank in the varied biography of this company of adventurers, his brain
fired with the excitements of their risks. Krutzmacht, it seemed to him, must have been such a one as these. He was on
the point of asking the old miner, who was the principal talker, if he had ever heard of Krutzmacht, when his ears caught
the words:

“I see by to-day’s San Francisco paper that a receivership has been asked for the Shasta companies. That means
they’ve got Krutzmacht, don’t it?”

“I expect so—he’s been on the edge some time from what I hear,” the younger man replied.

“So they got him. . . . I thought Herb would make good—he was a nervy Dutchman, if there ever was one! But he
couldn’t go up against that crowd.”

“When he began building his road through the mountains to the Bay, the S. P. crowd went for him and shut off his
credit. You’ve got to get permission to do some things in California.”

“I’m told he’d built up a big property.”

“That’s right—if he’d been able to hold on, there would have been millions, what with the power company, the timber,
the railroad, and the land. That’s why the S. P. people wanted it! They waited, and when the panic came on, they
began squeezing him. I saw him in New York a few days ago. I suppose he was trying to get money from some of
those big Jew bankers where he’d got it before. But it isn’t the right time to pass the hat in Wall Street just now.”

The talk ran on desultorily about “the S. P. crowd,” who it seemed were the financial dictators of the Pacific Coast and
“the nerve of the Dutchman who went up against that bunch.” Brainard listened closely to every word, but refrained
from asking questions for fear of betraying an undue interest in Krutzmacht. As far as he could make out, with his
inexperience in business affairs, Krutzmacht’s companies were valuable and solvent, but he himself was embarrassed,
as many men of large enterprises were at this time, and his enemies had taken this opportune moment to get possession
of his properties, using for that purpose the courts of which they seemed to have control as they had of the legislature
and the governor.

“It’s a shame,” the younger stranger remarked frankly; “I expect they’ll put him through the mill and take every dollar he
owns.”

“They’ll eat the hide off him all right!”

“Well, well,” the miner sighed in conclusion. “So Herb’s lost out! He’s a nervy one, though, obstinate as a mule.
Wouldn’t surprise me if he crawled through somehow. I remember him years ago when he had a mine down in
Arizona, a big low-grade copper proposition. That was in nineteen four, no,—three. It was another of those big
schemes, too big for any one man,—a railroad and a smelter besides the mine. He claimed there was a fortune in it—
and I guess it was so—only he was forced to shut down, and the next I heard of him he was out here on the Coast in
this Shasta proposition.”

And that was all they had to say about Krutzmacht.

VI

“Do you know who that man is?” Brainard asked the old miner as the gentleman under bonds to return to California

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strolled out of the smoking room.

“Why, that’s Eddie Hollinger.”

“And who is Mr. Hollinger?”

“Say, young feller, don’t you ever read the papers where you live? Why, he’s the boss of the prize ring business here
on the Coast,—the ‘fight trust,’ as they call it. Made lots of money. Mighty fine feller Ed is, too. He’s having his
troubles these days the same as the rest of us. They’re trying him for bribery, you know.”

After he had delivered himself of an impassioned defense of the “business men who were being hounded by a lot of
hypocrites,” Brainard led him back to Krutzmacht, or as the miner preferred to call him, “that nervy Dutchman.” But
beyond elaborating the story of his own personal encounter with the German a number of years before somewhere in
Arizona, the miner could add little to what had already been told. The German was a daring and adventurous man, who
had been “known on the Coast” for thirty years or more,—always involved in some large financial venture in which he
had been backed by capital from his native land. “But it’s up and down with all of us,” he sighed in conclusion and
drifted on to tell his own story. He talked with the volubility and hopefulness of youth. When he said that he hadn’t
seen a white man in six months except the dozen “dagoes” working his claim, his volubility seemed to Brainard
excusable. It was less easy to explain his hopeful mood, for it appeared that he had knocked about the mountain states
for the better part of a lifetime with scarcely more to show for his efforts than what was contained in his lean bag. But
the roll of blue prints of his claim, with the little bag of specimen ore, was in his eyes a sure guarantee of fortune.

“You’d oughter see my mine,—the Rosy Lee I call it because that was my wife’s name. It’s a winner sure! I’m
expecting they’ll break into the vein every blast. May get a wire in Frisco that they’re in, and then you bet I’ll go
whooping back to pick up the dollars! The Union, next door to me, so to speak, got some ore that ran forty thousand
to the ton—they’ve taken out four millions already.”

He rambled on about “shoots,” “winzes,” “stopes,” “faults,” and geological formation until he had thoroughly fired the
young man’s imagination with the fascinating lure of the search for “metal.” They examined the specimens in the old
miner’s bag and talked far into the night while the train panted up the steep grades and the moonlight lay white on the
snowdrifts of the mountains outs...